The Auerbach Case: Part Four-Other views of Dr. Philipp Auerbach

by Marc Masurovsky

Benjamin Ferencz at the IMT, Nurnberg

Benjamin Ferencz, former prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal of Nürnberg:

“One flamboyant German official, Philip Auerbach, in charge of compensation claims in Bavaria, was quite a bizarre figure. It was rumored that he had been interned by the Nazis because he was tainted by Jewish blood. It was known that he paid little attention to formalities. I always considered him neurotic. On several occasions he sought me out for a donation from the JRSO for some strange scheme he concocted. I always refused. I recall a detailed plan he had for shipping Hitler’s stolen art works to the United States for exhibitions in museums that would pay well for the privilege. The money would then go back to the compensation fund. He had the name of the ship, the museums, and the amounts payable. I was not really surprised when, after I checked it out, I learned that it was all a figment of his imagination. When he and the head of a local Jewish community announced that they were establishing a Jewish Restitution Bank to receive deposits from concentration camp victims, I immediately cabled Jewish organizations throughout the world to beware. Exactly one year later, the police closed down the so-called bank; the finances of the Auerbach office were under investigation, and he committed suicide. It was a crazy time with crazy people doing crazy things.”

Le Monde, 19 August 1952, “Suicide of a former Bavarian commissioner on refugee matters provokes general consternation. »

Since Bavaria refused for a long time to elevate the Compensation and Restitution Office and its Director to a legally recognized status, Auerbach was not under any parliamentary oversight and did not benefit from a regular budget. He had to find another way to raise compensation funds using shortcuts and indirect pathways. “He reveled in using expedients, he had a predilection for shady and complex dealings, which allowed him to assert his authority and to engage in opaque and interwoven financial arrangements which would get him into a heap of trouble. No one contests these facts.”

Conclusion:

Was Dr. Philipp Auerbach a victim or a criminal? Did he concoct his outlandish scheme to sell off confiscated Jewish paintings acquired for Hitler and Goering for the purpose of enriching himself? Or was it more of a case of using whatever means necessary to ensure that Holocaust survivors would receive their due, regardless of the legality and reasonableness of his tactics. As Benjamin Ferencz said, “it was a crazy time with crazy people doing crazy things.”

One thing is certain: the Auerbach scandal exposed many of the fault lines that have since haunted the international debate over what to do with unclaimed Jewish cultural assets. Since Auerbach’s death in 1952, Jewish groups have never ceased to look at “unclaimed Jewish cultural assets” as fodder to be sold and monetized for the benefit of Holocaust victims’ heirs. It still remains that nothing is unclaimed unless you declare it to be so. And, if you do, under whose authority and on what grounds?

Sources for Part One-Part Four

Primary sources

National Archives, College Park, MD

Indemnisation des victimes du nazime, 14 mars 1949, RG 59, Lot 62D4, Box 26, NARA

Eric Gration, secrétaire du bureau du Haut Commissariat américain en Allemagne, à George Eric Rosden, 21 janvier 1950, Confidential, 007 Fine Arts, USACA, NARA; [Faison à Hanfstaengl, 11 juin 1951, RG 59 Lot 62D 4, Box 17, NARA

S. Lane Faison, Jr., HICOG, Prop. Div. OEA, Collecting Point Munich to Dr. Eberhard Hanfstaengl, general manager, Arcisstrasse 10, Munich, 11 June 1951, Ardelia Hall Collection, RG 59 Lot 62D4 Box 17, NARA.

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes (AMAE), La Courneuve, France

Doubinsky to Colonel Bonet-Madry, head of the French restitution mission, Frankfurt, 25 May 1949, RA 237, AMAE 
Doubinsky to Valland, 28 October 1949, RV 237, AMAE
Rose Valland to Munsing, 10 november 1949, Berlin, RV 237, AMAE
Munsing to Valland, 13 February 1950, RV 237, AMAE

Other archives

Auerbach's rich correspondence and other personal material from the years 1946 to 1951, which are stored in Bavaria's Hauptstamtsarchiv, are now open to researchers. The Staatsarchiv in Munich holds the complete court records of the April 1952 trial.

Books, journals and newspaper articles

Brady, Kate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/26/schloss-elmau-castle-g7-germany/

Brenner, Michael and Kronenberg, Kenneth
https://www.scribd.com/book/392107133/A-History-of-Jews-in-Germany-Since-1945-Politics-Culture-and-Society

Ferencz, Benjamin B.
https://benferencz.org/stories/1948-1956/implementing-compensation-agreements/

Klare, Hans Hermann
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/reading-auerbach

Ludi, Regula
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/reparations-for-nazi-victims-in-postwar-europe/germany/667D60BE8D2B06D1D50BC2B50D94D7CF biblio

Ludyga, Hannes
https://buchhandlung-buchner.buchkatalog.at/philipp-auerbach-1906-1952-9783830510963

Sabin, Stefana
https://faustkultur.de/literatur-buchkritik/opfer-und-taeter/


Other links
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Subsequent_Nuremberg_trials
https://www.jta.org/archive/philip-auerbach-commits-suicide-act-due-to-verdict-of-german-court
https://nataliereardon.weebly.com/victims.html
https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1952/08/19/le-suicide-de-l-ancien-commissaire-bavarois-aux-refugies-provoque-une-grande-emotion-en-allemagne_1999225_1819218.html
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/philipp-auerbach
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1952/08/17/110062774.html?pageNumber=1

Orphans

by Marc Masurovsky

Historian Lisa Leff pointed out in her recent book, “The Archive Thief,” how, in the late 1940s, the leadership of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) compared identifiable books recovered in former Nazi-held territories in the aftermath of WWII to “kidnapped children.” According to Rabbi Bernard Heller, the “theoretical” restitution” of these “kidnapped children” would be akin to reuniting them with their “overjoyed parents”. For those cultural assets that could not be matched with an identifiable owner, these “stunned waifs” would be placed in “foster homes” run by “loving foster parents.” As it turns out, these “abductees” ended up in a complex network of “foster homes” happy as pie to become the new “[foster] parents.” These new “homes” consist of museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions, State-controlled and/or private, Jewish and non-Jewish around the world.

The JCR was tasked with redistributing among Jewish communities worldwide (mostly in the United States, Europe and Palestine/Israel) those cultural objects bearing no obvious markings that might tie them to an owner. In their zeal, even objects that could have been reunited with rightful owners were treated as “waifs.”

Decades later, European governments explained how they treated Jewish-owned assets in the post-Holocaust world and if they had made any effort to return them or make them available to their owners or next of kin. For example, the Swedish authorities issued a report in 1997 on “orphaned” assets located in Swedish financial and other institutions. To them “orphaned” meant that assets had remained “unclaimed” for decades following the end of the Holocaust.  In Greece, “orphaned” property was transferred to an organization responsible for aiding needy survivors, most likely with the proceeds from liquidating such “orphaned” assets.  The same scenario also unfolded in countries like Austria and France with greater or lesser success.

In 2008, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem staged an exhibit called “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust at the Israel Museum.” More than 1200 “orphaned” items are catalogued at the Israel Museum. The Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) was the main collector of these cultural “orphans”. It operated in post-WWII Germany and Austria to locate, identify and disperse objects tagged as Jewish-owned, mostly without an identifiable owner to whom to return the found objects. The JCR was its redistribution arm.

Marilyn Henry, who wrote a regular column for the Jerusalem Post before her untimely death in  2011, argued that these “orphans” should be transferred to European Jewish cultural institutions since they came from European nations subjected to Nazi rule and terror. She mentioned how Benjamin Ferencz, the noted former chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, described recipients of “orphaned” assets as their new owners, rather than their trustees or custodians.
In other words, the new “parents” held clear title to these cultural “orphans.” Ferencz’s comment could be interpreted as a clear rebuke to any attempt by claimants, relatives of the unfortunate “parents”, to obtain restitution of these “objects”, in other words, reuniting them with their “families.”

Throughout the post-1945 era, museums, libraries and other cultural institutions have been transformed into massive “foster” homes for “orphaned” objects. In line with Ferencz’s comment, one can understand more clearly how Jewish museums around the world have been reluctant, remiss and even hostile to the idea of restituting any of the “orphans” that they lovingly curate and nurture as “foster parents.” Even the US Library of Congress played dumb in the late 1990s when faced with the evidence that they held at least a thousand valuable books spanning three centuries of noted Jewish authorship which it had obtained after WWII.

The London-based European Commission on Looted Art (ECLA) has described “orphaned” works as having no prior ownership history. If we adapt that line of thought liberally and argue that any cultural object is an “orphan” whose previous ownership history is non-existent, the vast majority of cultural objects currently sitting in cultural institutions worldwide or being offered for sale by auction houses across the globe should be dubbed as “orphans” in want of their “parents” due to the sheer absence of a provenance that describes their history. Surely, we cannot accuse the art world of being so cruel and insensitive, can we?

Incidentally, and this might be completely irrelevant, the US Senate considered a bill in 2008 referred to as the “Orphan Art Bill” which would regulate how copyrighted images can be used whose owners cannot be located. A law addressing similar issues was passed in the United Kingdom in 2013. Without getting in too deep into a legal swamp, users of copyrighted orphan works would not be penalized in their use and reuse of such images as long as they had been diligent in seeking out the purported owners of the images.  However, the US Copyright office noted recently that “the ownership status of orphan works does not serve the objectives of the copyright system. For good faith users, orphan works are a frustration, a liability risk, and a major cause of gridlock in the digital marketplace.”

Can the same reasoning be applied to cultural objects “orphaned” as a result of genocidal policies? Should we view cultural “orphans” as a liability risk? Not if we accept the Ferencz verdict of clear title to these objects.

And yet…

If we do generously apply that reasoning to cultural assets “orphaned” as a result of the violence that cost the lives of six million individuals of Jewish descent, we would have to question the level of diligence exerted by new “owners” (according to Ferencz) of “orphaned” cultural assets. In most cases, such diligence has not even been a consideration simply because the reigning assumption amongst the new “foster parents” was that the rightful owners had perished and not left any relatives who could become the new “parents” of these “orphaned” assets.

These poor “orphans” are routinely sold and resold through bookstores, antique shops, galleries, auction houses, Jewish and not, thus bouncing from one “loving foster parent” to another. If Rabbi Heller’s analogy holds, the treatment of these “orphans” constitutes systemic abuse and grievous neglect under the guise of providing a “good home” to those “waifs”.

Let’s face it, no systematic effort has been made in the past 80 years to find the “parents.”

You do know that objects are not people, something that, ironically, officials of Holocaust memorial institutions and even Jewish groups explain when they justify why they do not focus on cultural claims or include acts of plunder and misappropriation in their exhibits and educational programs. Isn’t it twisted irony that those responsible for the relocation and redistribution of “orphaned” objects grounded their arguments in anthropomorphic language to emphasize the humanitarian and profoundly sensitive motivations underlying their mission—to find new homes for the cultural wreckage of the Holocaust? Little did we know that these metaphors eliminated any possibility of viewing restitution as a viable solution to the fate of our “waifs”.

Schleiertanz (Veil Dance) 1920, by Paul Klee

Schleiertanz, 1920, Paul Klee

by Marc Masurovsky 

Paul Klee produced the watercolor known as “Schleiertanz”, the Veil Dance, in 1920. It was exhibited in Munich at the Neue Kunst Hans Goltz until June 1920. Thereafter, Harry Fuld, Sr., a Jewish businessman from Frankfurt am Main, acquired the Klee watercolor and kept it in the family until his death in 1932. His eleven-year old son, Peter “Harry” Fuld, Jr., and his non-Jewish mother, Ida, inherited the Klee together with the rest of Harry’s considerable art collection, businesses and real property. Peter became a millionaire. However, Hitler’s ascent to power in late January 1933 changed all of that. Due to Nazi persecutions, Peter “Harry” Fuld, Jr. left for England shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Before his departure, the Klee was placed in storage with the shipping firm of Gustav Knauer in 1937 as well as other objects and property belonging to the Fuld family. In 1941, the Reich overrode Fuld’s ownership of items stored at Knauer’s and any real, financial and commercial property still owned by the Fulds in Germany since Harry—his father--was a Jew, Peter, although a “half-Jew”—his mother was not Jewish—was still treated as though he were Jewish. All Jews living in Germany who had “abandoned” their property to go into self-imposed exile, lost whatever assets they still held to the Reich, an act that the victorious Allied powers deemed illegal after their victory over the Third Reich in May 1945.

Some of the objects in the Fuld crates left with Knauer were placed in museums in Frankfurt, where Fuld’s family came from. It could be that all the crates packed by the Fuld family had been deposited with Knauer in Frankfurt instead of Berlin, which some researchers believe to be the case. At some point, perhaps in 1943 or 1944, the ERR, the Nazi plundering agency, designated “Schleiertanz” as a Neuwied item, an indication that it might have been stored at a customs warehouse in Neuwied which served as a central repository for items seized from Jews in Belgium and Holland.

Schloss Kogl

The absence of a “Neuwied number” for “Schleiertanz” makes it more likely that the Klee was sent to ERR headquarters at Bellevuestrasse in Berlin, a way station for confiscated "modern" works of art, from which it was transferred in a crate with other “Neuwied” items to the ERR depot of Kogl in Austria, a main recipient of loot from Western Europe, including items whose owners were “unknown”, like those marked Neuwied. It could be that the Klee was reclassified as a Neuwied item then. In 1945, the Americans found it in a crate stamped “Neuwied" and so designated it as well.
 
In 1940, the British authorities interned the young Peter Fuld as an “enemy alien” and shipped him to Canada where he remained until the end of WWII. He was released in 1941 and went to school at the University of Toronto where he sought both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor in Law. He took Canadian citizenship in 1946 at the time of his graduation from the University of Toronto. Fuld had also fallen in love with Ivy Lawrence, a “woman of color” from Trinidad and a fellow student who was a year ahead of him.  Their unorthodox interracial romance shook things up on the Toronto campus. 

Ivy Lawrence and Peter "Harry" Fuld in Canada

Although the Nazis would have treated Peter a “mischling” or “halbjude,” still, in Canada, he had a difficult time fitting in anywhere not being born of a Jewish mother, being a native of Germany, and involved romantically with a woman from Trinidad. Ironic that he suffered similar discrimination thousands of miles away from Nazi Germany, free of racial persecution, but not free of discrimination.

In the spring of 1945, American troops liberated Schloss Kogl, one of the ERR’s depots in the Attergau in Austria, and carted off everything it contained including the Klee to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) in Munich, the administrative center of the US zone of occupation of Germany, where it arrived in 1946. Three years later, in 1949, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) received Fuld’s Klee as heirless property from the American repatriation authorities in Munich as well as hundreds of other cultural and artistic items. Together with all other heirless properties it had gathered in the Allied occupation zones in Germany and Austria, the JRSO ceded these cultural assets to the Bezalel National Museum in the newly minted State of Israel. Bezalel preceded the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “Schleiertanz” was transferred in 1950 and incorporated into the permanent collection of the Israel Museum until its restitution in September 2010.

After WWII ended, Fuld returned to England before eventually settling in Germany. He sought out his mother, Ida, with whom he had lost touch upon going into exile as a young man and initiated proceedings to obtain restitution of his family’s lost assets which the Nazis had misappropriated. Ivy joined him in London but , once found, his mother threatened to commit suicide should he ever marry Ivy. That threat caused the breakup between Peter Fuld and Ivy and resulted in tremendous emotional harm to Peter. He required regular care at the hands of a psychiatrist. After returning to Germany, Peter died of brain cancer in March 1962. At his death, Fuld had somehow complicated matters with his estate since he had left a will to which were attached four codicils which resulted in a number of legal proceedings challenging one or more of the codicils. Some had been drafted in England, others in Germany. The messiness of inheritance especially as it affects looted and misappropriated property, cultural, financial, and immovable, was fueled by his bitter mother and the psychiatrist who had cared for Peter through his erratic emotional upheavals.
According to an article that appeared in the magazine “Ebony”, the trial over Peter Fuld’s estate produced transcripts totaling 3 million words and kept Ivy in the witness box for days. 18 million dollars (1962 value) were at stake as well as his looted assets which he had labored to recover from Germany. One third of the “residuary estate” went to Fuld’s aging mother. Another part of the estate went to Ivy with a proviso that she use 10 per cent of it for educational betterment in the West Indies. The rest went to Gita Gisela Martin, his housekeeper.

The late German lawyer and restitution specialist, Dr. Jost von Trott zu Solz, garnered the historical evidence to prove that “Schleiertanz” had once rightfully belonged to the Fuld family which had lost it at the hands of the Nazis. In 2010, the Israel Museum’s leadership accepted the evidence and agreed to restitute the Klee to Gita Gisela Martin who donated it to the Magen David Adom UK, the Israeli equivalent to the Red Cross organization, to which she had donated other “holdings” from the Peter Fuld estate. 

In turn, Magen David sold the Klee in New York through Sotheby’s as Lot Nr. 342 on November 3, 2010. It garnered $326,500.

As usual, beware of mis-written provenances. The Sotheby’s provenance for “Schleiertanz” misinterprets the historical material regarding the Neuwied phase of the Klee’s travails and does not acknowledge the fact that the Israel Museum returned the Klee to the Fuld heir who then donated it to Magen David, the consignor! It’s all in the details.

Researching heirless property in Israel

by Shir Kochavi

The end of the Second World War arrived at a time when Israel (then, Palestine) had been fighting for independence both in the political field and on its territories. The new State (est. 1948) was perceived and promoted as ‘the land of the Jewish people’, and many Holocaust survivors were arriving to settle from Europe. Israeli representatives urged the Allied countries (the U.S., UK and France) to send the young State monetary support (compensations) and remaining cultural property that belonged to Jewish communities from Europe.

Mordechai Narkiss, the first director of the Bezalel Museum and Gershom Scholem, of the National Library, were two important personalities who went, between 1949-1953, to the Central Collecting Points in the US and in the British Zones of Occupation in Germany to evaluate property and select objects to transfer to institutions in Israel.

Their cooperation with organizations like the JCR (Jewish Cultural Reconstruction) and the JRSO (Jewish Restitution Successor Organization) resulted in thousands of books and manuscripts and pieces of Judaica and works of art being sent to Israel.

In correspondence from that time period, we often find references to different messengers sent from Israel to countries around the world. Many were sent on behalf of Jewish organizations like the WJO (World Zionist Organization), The Jewish Agency and the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee). While Israeli messengers assisted Jewish communities around the world to reestablish themselves in a variety of fields, others went to Europe hoping to find remains from Jewish communities that perished during the Holocaust.

One of such messengers was Miriam Novitch. Born in 1908 in White Russia, she moved to France before the outbreak of the Second World War and was arrested in 1943 as a resistance fighter. She was released from Camp Vittel in 1944 and came to Israel in 1946. She devoted her life to Holocaust documentation and research, and often went back to Europe. Novitch worked with several institutions in Israel, most notably the Ein Harod Museum (est. 1937) and the Ghetto Fighters House (est. 1949), where many of the objects that she had brought during her travels in Europe can be found today.[1]

The whereabouts of objects apportioned among Israeli institutions such as the Jewish Orthodox council and the office for Education remains unclear today, especially when it comes to books and Judaica.

Books and Judaica were often allotted to libraries, synagogues, schools and other institution across the State. The idea was to make these objects (formally belonging to perished Jews) available for use by Jews living in the newly independent State. At the time, there was a general dearth of books, Judaica and many other objects for teaching and learning in Israel.

In 1965 the Israel Museum succeeded the Bezalel Museum and absorbed many of its collections, including works of art and Judaica shipped in the early 1950’s from the Munich and Wiesbaden Central Collecting Points. The objects were catalogued and divided between the relevant departments where they are kept today. In 2007 the Museum uploaded images and information about these objects, a collection known as the “JRSO Collection” [Jewish Restitution Successor Organization] onto the website of the Israel Museum.[2] The following year, the Museum devoted an exhibition to this collection, the first-ever organized in Israel on the theme of “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust in the Israel Museum”.

These are some of the many ways by which European objects found their way into Israel after the Holocaust. Part of our research and documentation work focuses on:

• understanding the context of an object; culturally, economically, historically etc. 
• the people who were involved in the creation, evaluation, acquisition or transport of an object 
• the political and cultural views at the time are taken into account and serve as background for any inquiry. In some cases this information can assist in locating the object, when its whereabouts are unknown. 

Shir Kochavi (M.A.) is a researcher at the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets in Israel. She has been researching heirless cultural property in Israeli collections and the dispersal of works of art by the JRSO (Jewish Restitution Successor Organization). Shir recently participated in the PRTP-Zagreb where she was introducing the notion of "heirless" cultural property and the postwar work of the JRSO in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria.
-------
[*] Source: http://www.infocenters.co.il/gfh
[1] At the Ghetto Fighters House she established a large collection of testimonies, films, art and other objects which she collected throughout her visits to Europe.
[2] Further information about the JRSO Collection can be found: http://www.imj.org.il/Imagine/irso/